Where the Wild things are Part CXII
Truth be told we lost count of this series of blog entries on finding plants in the wild a long time ago, so now I google a random number over 100 and ask it what it is in roman numerals. This episode is going to be a bit of teaser but touch on a few places we have been this year. For some reason I thought I was going to spend most of the summer with a backpack on and a camera slung around my neck, a pocket full of glassine envelopes, traipsing through the high country in search of fantastic new plants to grow. It didn’t exactly work out the way I had planned but I did manage to get out and about a few times. Believe me I count myself lucky to get to see the things I do, even if it means scrimping and saving, and going without the finer things in life, travel is the key to maintaining my sanity. That and evenings and mornings spent playing guitar.
Oh, I should also mention that the flower bulb catalog had an inventory update and while it’s not a huge restock there are a few things back on the list that were sold out in the early rounds. We will keep shipping up until the fall plant sales season kicks in.
I'm throwing up a few galleries for you all to peruse here as we go into the dog days of summer. I’m getting quite the backlog of things to blog about and so I’m thinking I’m going to have to break it down into some small chunks here that are easier to chew.
Japan-We went to Japan in March to celebrate my daughter Anya’s commencement from UBC with honors in the school of Archeology and her admittance to the graduate program at Simon Frazier University for a masters degree. While we didn’t get a lot of time to traipse the woodlands in search of wildflowers, we did manage a day at the stunning Rokko Alpine Botanical garden. So some of the wild things you see here are wild things in the captive confines of a botanical garden. Still a great way to see some wildflowers if you can’t make it to all the islands, go to where they have all the rarest flowers in one spot. I brought my good camera and I have something like 300 gigs of photo’s to go through. Japan was an amazing trip and really kind of a life changing experience really. They just look at the same problems that many cultures have and approach them so differently. I came back with fantastic new perspectives on humanity from this trip.
Enjoy a few pictures of our travels far and wide this past year:
Mt. Jefferson, or Seekseequa as it was known to the natives of the warm springs. We managed one backpacking trip this summer, a quick overnighter to the stunning Jeff park area. This area was one of my ramblings as a kid where some friends and I could pack a tent some peanut butter and bread and a fishing pole and head to the alpine lakes anytime we wanted. Now it requires a permit, 6 months in advance. Thankfully our buddy Billy got one. The wildflowers were on point for this trip. I spent a lot of it pondering the damage that the catastrophic lions head fire of a few years ago. It burned a lot of the trail in but thankfully not the park area itself which is a high elevation lakes basin just below the mountain.
Alaska-I went to visit Fairbanks Alaska and the White Mountains with Jane McGary as my guide a few years ago, she had spent some of her younger days here on a language documentation project with the university recording and documenting the different languages of the indigenous tribes. Sometimes recording the last speaker of a dying language. I fell in love with the White Mountains and I have shown more of them here in the past, so you can scroll back in the blog a few years to see more wildflowers or have me out to do my photo filled lecture on this wonderful mountain range! I decided a quick jaunt up to the Tundra would be a great escape from the heat of an Oregon Summer and we might find a few of the botanical treasures of this magnificent alpine range on the cusp of the arctic circle in seed. Indeed we did and we also found a few flowers still clinging to the rapidly vanishing arctic summer.
Has it been a busy year? Yes. That is probably an understatement, but what does that mean for you? Well I can say that I think we have the best fall plant catalog we have ever had coming up this year. We will wait until things cool down a bit in September to get to shipping live plants again, but I can tell you that you are going to want to get in on this years offering. The new shade structure, with it’s aluminet 40% shade has kept the alpines so happy this summer, the geothermal greenhouse with it’s ability to lower those scorching hot summer temps helped us get way more seed established than in years past. The cutting bench is chock full of goodies for the springs to come and right now we are just waiting to fill your last minute bulb order!
Cheers,
Mark and the Illahe Crew